Secure Communities

Through the Secure Communities strategy, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) improves public safety every day by transforming the way criminal aliens are identified and removed from the United States. This strategy leverages an existing information sharing capability between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to quickly and accurately identify aliens who are arrested for a crime and booked into local law enforcement custody. With this capability, the fingerprints of everyone arrested and booked are not only checked against FBI criminal history records, but they are also checked against DHS immigration records. If fingerprints match DHS records, ICE determines if immigration enforcement action is required, considering the immigration status of the alien, the severity of the crime and the alien's criminal history.

Secure Communities also helps ICE maximize and prioritize its resources to ensure that the right people, processes and infrastructure are in place to accommodate the increased number of criminal aliens being identified and removed.

Secure Communities modernizes the identification and removal processes by:

Using fingerprint-based biometric identification technology,
Prioritizing resources toward the greatest threats, and
Sharing information between law enforcement partners